Apparently sore because Governor Malloy canceled raises for the few thousand state employees who are not unionized, 65 percent of the nearly 200 lawyers working in the office of state Attorney General George Jepsen have petitioned for union representation. The state Board of Labor Relations may call a secret-ballot election to decide the issue.

Jepsen is a Democrat and his party is a subsidiary of the government employee unions, so he may be courageous just for declaring neutrality about the organizing drive. But given state government’s disastrous financial position, this may be time to ask how any elected official can be neutral between the interest of government employees and the public interest — to ask: What is the public interest in collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees as provided by state law, which gives their compensation priority over all else in government?

Of course collective bargaining makes state employees happy. In Connecticut it has gained them superior wages as well as benefits enjoyed by few private-sector workers, mere taxpayers. For most state employees it also has provided nearly absolute protection against dismissal for misconduct or incompetence, as demonstrated the other day by the reinstatement of a University of Connecticut employee who smoked marijuana while operating a university truck.

But the lawyers in the AG’s office are hardly exploited. They already earn an average of $126,000 per year, with 75 percent more, another $94,000, in fringe benefits, and the growing prosperity of government in Connecticut has corresponded with the decline of the private sector and the disconnection of government employees from private-sector workers. That is, government employees are now insulated from and indifferent to the burdens of the people they serve.

With the private sector more strained and unable to bear higher taxes to finance the rising standard of living of the government class, the compensation of government employees now cannibalizes public services. On the state level help for the innocent needy is being reduced and on the municipal level school programs are being eliminated. People complain of “budget cuts” when there are no cuts at all, just transfers from services to personnel compensation.

Further, lacking political courage, governors and legislators have failed to fund adequately state government’s pension promises to its employees. Adequate funding would have cannibalized more services or raised taxes more. State government is already insolvent and soon may not be able to do much more than finance its retirees.

Honest leaders of the state employee unions may acknowledge the superior gains of their members but argue that the answer to the divergence of government-class and private-sector living standards is greater unionization in the private sector. There’s little chance of that, for the two sectors aren’t really comparable.

Government doesn’t have to compete or succeed; it can fail forever without penalty, as it often does in Connecticut, particularly with poverty and education, and all challenges to government employees can be erased by the political influence of their unions.

But private-sector enterprises either compete and succeed or die or move, since, as Connecticut increasingly is seeing, most private-sector enterprises, unlike government, are mobile. So these days not much outside government gets unionized, government employees now constitute half of union membership, and businesses move out.

Though some assistant attorneys general are managers, nothing is likely to stop their unionization. For managers are already unionized throughout state and municipal government in Connecticut, thereby making public administration almost impossible.

Public administration is not likely to return to Connecticut until the state has a government that acknowledges a distinction between the public interest and the interest of government employees. It’s hard to find even a Republican who dares to do that.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.